'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Yglesias nails McCain

Think Progress and Matt Yglesias's blog, now also over at the Center for American Progress, are emerging as two of the most thought-provoking blogs on foreign policy decisionmaking in Washington.

Today, Yglesias absolutely nails the irresponsible and dangerously escalatory nature of John McCain's rhetoric over the Georgia crisis.

He notes that McCain has described the Georgia-Russia war the “first serious crisis internationally since the end of the Cold War” and joins with those (including Think Progress's Satyam) who have pointed out that, erm, just a few other crises much graver than that in Georgia have occurred since 1991.

Matt adds:

beyond McCain’s seemingly poor memory, the interesting thing is the confusion in terms of high-level concepts. It was just a little while ago that McCain was giving speeches about how “the threat of radical Islamic terrorism” is “transcendent challenge of our time.” Now Russia seems to be the transcendent challenge. Which is the problem with an approach to world affairs characterized by a near-constant hysteria about threat levels and a pathological inability to set priorities.

I particularly liked the "pathological" there, though perhaps "pathogenic" would also be a good description. Because this "gadfly" quality of McCain's, that apparently does prevent him from setting clear priorities in global affairs, would cause considerable harm to Americans and the other 95% of the world's people if he got elected President... Especially when allied to his longstanding tendency to see enormous threats wherever he looks. (We could call this latter condition "phobiaphilia." Of course, the entire military-industrial-'contractor' complex depends on it.)